A Homemade Life Page 5

  Straight from the bag, prunes are very good, but with a little heat and moisture, they get very, very good. I consider myself lucky to have been schooled from an early age in the art of stewing them. In our house, it usually happened late at night, after Burg had changed out of his suit and into his blue polka-dotted bathrobe. He would load up a heavy saucepan with prunes, water, and thin slices of orange and lemon. Then he’d bring it to a boil, turn off the heat, snap on a lid, and let the pan sit until morning. By that point, the prunes hardly counted as dried fruits anymore; they were now soft, silky pockets of juice. When you scooped one up, it would slump wearily on the spoon, as though it had been woken up too early. Its skin would yield to the tooth with a gentle, dainty pop, and underneath, the flesh was lip-lickingly sweet, winey, and complex. The food safety people would have probably looked askance at Burg’s overnight method, so I can’t really advise it, but it did make ours a solidly pro-prune household.

  Which is a good thing, no matter what people say.

  STEWED PRUNES WITH CITRUS AND CINNAMON

  i treat my prunes very simply, as my father did. I use a method that’s a little more conventional than his, but it’s every bit as easy. They’re delicious warm, with oatmeal or ice cream or thick Greek yogurt, although I also like them cold. That’s how I eat them most days, in fact, alongside my bowl of cereal.

  1 small orange or tangerine, preferably seedless, or ½ small orange and ½ lemon

  1 pound best-quality pitted prunes

  1 cinnamon stick

  Cut the orange in half from stem to tip, and then slice it very thinly, peel and all. If it has seeds, pick them out as you go. Put the orange slices in a medium saucepan with the prunes and the cinnamon stick, and add water to just cover. Place over medium heat. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook, adjusting the heat as needed so that the liquid barely trembles, for 30 to 45 minutes, or until the prunes are tender, the orange slices are soft and glassy, and the liquid in the pan is slightly syrupy. Remove the cinnamon stick, cool slightly, and serve. Or let the prunes cool to room temperature and then store them in a sealed container in the refrigerator for up to a week.

  NOTE: Stewed prunes improve with rest, so I try to make mine a day or so before I want to eat them.

  Yield: about 10 servings

  A BROOD OF SEVEN

  When I was little, I thought my mother came from the most perfect family. They were all petite and attractive, four sons and three daughters, raised in a little house in Towson, Maryland, with a flagstone path that led to the front steps, a kitchen the size of an airplane galley, and three small bedrooms tucked under the eaves. I always thought of Stuart Little when I thought of that house. He would have been right at home there. He could have tucked his matchbox bed into a corner of the kitchen and become the official family mascot.

  My mother was the third child in the brood. First came Chris, then Jerry, then my mother and, a minute or two after, her identical twin sister Tina. Eleven months later came a second set of twins, Millicent and John, and then the last, a baby boy named Jody. (My grandmother, as you might guess, was a real champ in the pregnancy department.) For his part, my father had one brother, Arnold, but we didn’t see him nearly as often as we saw my mother’s brothers and sisters. Arnie lives on the East Coast, and he doesn’t like to fly. But my mother’s siblings were spread out all over the place, and when we weren’t spending holidays or summer vacations with my half-siblings, who were all a good deal older than me and likewise spread out all over the place, we spent them with my mother’s family.

  My aunts and uncles were fascinating and exotic. When we sent mail to them, I got to write all sorts of strange names on the address label, like “Snowmass, Colorado,” where winter, I imagined, lasts all year long, or “Santa Rosa, California,” where my uncle Jerry once took me to a knick-knack store called Sweet Potato and bought me a pinky-sized set of bowling pins. I remember Jerry coming to visit us once in Oklahoma City, and how I couldn’t sleep that night, waiting for him to arrive. I remember him flicking on the lamp beside my bed and leaning down to hug me. He was a horseman, and he wore flannel shirts all the time, mainly red and black checked ones, with blue jeans and boots. He had a boyish voice that could switch from serious to playful at the slightest instigation, one of those voices that sounds kind of crinkly, for lack of a better word, the way a person’s voice sounds when he is smiling. When he spoke, his voice rustled in his throat like a bowl of potato chips does when you reach your hand in. Jerry was gay, and he lived with a man named Tom. My mother told me that they were “partners.” So far as I could tell, they were just like any other couple in the family, except that when my cousins and I were playing in their house one Christmas, we found a book full of black-and-white pictures of naked men in weird positions. I had never heard of my parents doing anything that looked like that.

  When I was nine, Jerry died of AIDS. It was March of 1988, fairly early on in things, as the disease went. They didn’t have any of the medications they have now. When he died, he was on his way to New York to see a doctor about an experimental treatment. He had flown to Baltimore to meet up with my grandmother, who was going to accompany him to New York, when he had to be hospitalized with Pneumocystis pneumonia. I remember sitting on the edge of my parents’ bed late one night, or maybe it was early in the morning, and watching my mother pack her suitcase for the memorial service. It was held in the Catholic church where they went every Sunday as kids, and afterward, the siblings went to see the movie Hairspray at the Senator Theater. John Waters, the director of Hairspray, is from Towson, and so was Divine, the enormous transvestite who played Edna; they went to high school with my mother and aunts and uncles. As it happens, Divine died on March 7, the day after Jerry, and was buried in the local cemetery. I always thought that was very cool, that my uncle and Divine might be putting on drag shows in the afterlife together.

  After Jerry died, everything was different. It was like some seal had been broken, and whatever it was that was holding our family in place wasn’t there anymore. My mother’s sister Millicent was diagnosed with cancer only three weeks after Jerry’s memorial service. Millicent was forty-one, with a baby who wasn’t quite yet two. She’d been married only three years before, on a boat in Seattle, and I was a flower girl, along with my cousins Katie and Sarah, Tina’s daughters. We wore poofy-sleeved dresses with smocking across the chest. My dad made mix tapes for the reception, and we danced to Lionel Richie and Whitney Houston. Mia, as we called her, was beautiful in her ivory lace dress, with a ripply laugh that reverberated through the room. Not long after, she got a sore throat that wouldn’t go away, and the doctors said it was lung cancer. She died at home in June of 1989, asleep, in a nightgown dotted with pink flowers.

  I knew that what was happening to my family was really bad, and I knew that my mother cried a lot, but I didn’t know that all this early death wasn’t normal. I guess whatever you grow up with seems normal. It’s your life, no matter what it is. The year after Mia died, I found Gilda Radner’s memoir on my mother’s bookshelf. It’s called It’s Always Something, and it tells the story of her struggle with ovarian cancer. I thought it was fantastic, and I gave a book report on it for my fifth grade Language Arts class. My teacher, Mrs. Waldo, must have wrung her hands as I stood at the chalkboard and told my classmates about Gilda’s meditation practice. Gilda loved to do laundry, especially towels, and when she was sick, she used to visualize her abdomen as a pink terrycloth towel. She envisioned the chemotherapy as a detergent swishing through, cleaning away all the specks of dirt (the dirt being cancer) which had embedded themselves in the little pink towel. I didn’t know that eleven-year-old girls don’t usually read books about ovarian cancer. In fact, until I started to write this paragraph, it didn’t seem strange to me at all.

  In my family, for many years, all the adults had “sad attacks.” They cried at the holiday dinner table. It was uncomfortable sometimes, but I was also intrigued by it, by the way we live and then somet
imes, all of a sudden, start to die. We did the best we could to make sense of it. I gave my book report. My cousin Katie made a panel in Jerry’s name for the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. My cousin Sarah, though, did the best thing of all. She made pie.

  For most of her adult life, my aunt Mia made Hoosier Pie for Thanksgiving. No one knows where the recipe came from or how she found it, but in essence, it’s a pecan pie with chocolate and bourbon. It is, however, an unusually good pecan pie, with just the right ratio of nuts to soft, not-too-sweet goo. When Katie and Sarah were growing up, Mia lived nearby, so they had prime access to Hoosier Pie. In fact, Sarah told me the other day that it’s the only food she remembers from holidays when she was little. She never liked the traditional pumpkin pie, and apple pie didn’t excite her, but she loved Hoosier Pie.

  “Thanksgiving was all about that pie,” she says, “because it meant I could have chocolate.” Sarah loves chocolate. I love that about her.

  After Mia died, that first Thanksgiving, Sarah asked if she could make Hoosier Pie. From then on, she decided, she would make it every year in Mia’s memory. Nearly two decades have passed, but she’s yet to miss a year. Even the Thanksgiving when her parents had just divorced and no one wanted to cook, Hoosier Pie made the cut. With their father, Sarah and Katie ate Boston Market chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, and Mia’s pie. With their mother, they ate chicken breasts from the grill, more of the same potatoes, and more pie. They also, incidentally, made a pumpkin pie, but it fell on the floor, a classic example of survival of the fittest.

  Sarah is now married, and though her husband’s family is more of an apple pie clan than a pecan one, she makes Mia’s pie anyway.

  “I don’t care what other people want,” she says. “There will be Hoosier Pie.”

  Her mother-in-law is courteous and cuts herself a slice, but Sarah always has leftovers. They’re fantastic, she tells me, for breakfast the next morning. I hope to try that sometime, if I can actually get my Hoosier Pie to last past Thanksgiving dinner. This year, wherever she is, maybe Mia will pull some strings for me.

  HOOSIER PIE

  this pie is incredibly easy, which is part of why it makes such a good tradition. Sarah has made it in several kitchens over the years, and she says that it’s hard to mess up. Sometimes she forgets to bring the butter for the filling to room temperature, so she melts it instead. In her first apartment, on Boylston Street in Boston, she didn’t have a mixer or electric beaters, so she stirred in the sugar with a spoon. She also tells me that she’s thrown a handful of dried cranberries into the filling, and they were wonderful—“to die for,” actually—with the pecans and chocolate.

  Sarah uses a store-bought crust, but I like to make my own. Whatever you do, use the best bourbon you have, because its flavor will shine through. It should be the sort of thing you’d want to drink on its own. I like Woodford Reserve.

  FOR THE CRUST

  4 tablespoons ice water, plus more as needed

  ¾ teaspoon apple cider vinegar

  1½ cups unbleached all-purpose flour

  1 tablespoon sugar

  ¾ teaspoon salt

  1 stick plus 1 tablespoon (4½ ounces) cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes

  FOR THE FILLING

  4 tablespoons (2 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature

  1 cup sugar

  3 large eggs

  ¾ cup light corn syrup

  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  2 tablespoons bourbon

  ½ cup chocolate chips, preferably bittersweet, such as Ghirardelli 60%

  1 cup pecan halves

  FOR SERVING

  Unsweetened whipped cream, optional

  TO PREPARE THE CRUST

  In a small bowl or measuring cup, combine the ice water and cider vinegar.

  In the bowl of a food processor, combine the flour, sugar, and salt. Pulse to blend. Add the butter, and pulse until the mixture resembles a coarse meal; there should be no pieces of butter bigger than a large pea. With the motor running, slowly add the water-vinegar mixture, processing just until moist clumps form. If you pick up a handful of the dough and squeeze it in your fist, it should hold together. If the dough seems a bit dry, add more ice water by the teaspoon, pulsing to incorporate. I often find that 1 additional teaspoon is perfect.

  Turn the dough out onto a wooden board or clean countertop, and gather it, massaging and pressing, until it just holds together. Shape into a ball, and press into a disk about 1½ inches thick. If the disk cracks a bit at the edges, don’t worry; just pinch the cracks together as well as you can. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap, and then press it a bit more, massaging away any cracks around the edges, allowing the constraint of the plastic wrap to help you form it into a smooth disk. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours. (Dough can be kept in the refrigerator for up to 4 days or sealed in a heavy-duty plastic bag and frozen for up to 1 month. Thaw it in the refrigerator overnight before using.) Before rolling it out, allow the dough to soften slightly at room temperature.

  TO ASSEMBLE

  Set an oven rack to the middle position, and preheat the oven to 375°F. Roll the dough into a circle wide enough to fit a 9-or 9½-inch pie plate. Transfer the dough gently into the pie plate, and fold and crimp the edges to form a high fluted rim. Put the prepared pie plate in the refrigerator while you make the filling.

  In a medium bowl, beat the butter on medium-low speed until soft and creamy. Gradually add the sugar, beating all the while. When the sugar is fully incorporated, add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Then add the corn syrup, vanilla, and salt. Beat well. Beat in the bourbon. The batter should be pale yellow and fairly thin.

  Remove the prepared pie plate from the refrigerator. Scatter the chocolate chips and nuts evenly over the base of the crust; then pour in the batter. Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, checking every 5 minutes after the 30-minute mark. The filling will puff gently as it bakes. The pie is ready when the edges are firm, the top is deep brown, and the center seems set but jiggles ever so slightly. Transfer the pie to a wire rack to cool to room temperature. The filling will firm up as it cools.

  Serve with whipped cream, if you like.

  NOTE: Wrapped in plastic wrap, Hoosier Pie will keep at room temperature for up to 3 days, if it doesn’t get eaten first.

  Yield: 8 servings

  LA BOULE MICHE

  My parents took me to Paris for the first time when I was ten. It was spring break, and I was in the fourth grade. I told everyone in my class where we were going, and they oohed and ahhed approvingly, although I don’t think any of us knew what Paris really was. I certainly didn’t. It was like going to the moon.

  It strikes me now, in retrospect, that we took that trip barely a year after Jerry died, and that only three months later, Mia would die, too. My mother probably felt like she was living on the moon. She didn’t need Paris for that. I guess that’s why so much of what I remember from that trip is about my father. She’s like a blur at the edge of a photograph.

  I can’t really tell you about that trip, or about Paris at all, without starting with him. It’s funny. It’s not so much because of something he showed me or taught me there. In fact, sometimes it’s hard to remember anything more than a ghost of that first visit. And it’s not that Burg knew Paris particularly well, either. I’ve come to know it much better now than he ever did. But he loved that city, and I guess that’s it, really. He loved it so much. And in a sense, he gave it to me.

  To properly set the scene, what you need to know first is that my father had a truly excessive coat collection. My father had coats the way old spinsters have cats. He had something like thirty of them. He wasn’t a clotheshorse by any stretch of the imagination, but between his garage sale habit and his seemingly psychic attraction to half-price sale signs, it just sort of happened. The front hall closet was a minefield on hangers, a mishmash of wool, tweed, down, fleece, Gore-Tex, leather, and oilcloth, each so tightly
packed against the next that it wouldn’t have surprised me to find, upon opening the closet one day, that they had melded together into an enormous, all-weather quilt.

  On the chilly, mid-March morning that we landed in Paris, it was a beige trench that he had chosen from amidst the rabble, one of those thin, starchy kinds that fold, for ease of packing, into a zippered travel pouch sewn into the lining. (There is something in the Code of Fatherhood, I believe, that dictates that all dads must own this kind of collapsible, suitcase-ready jacket. That, and collapsible sunshields for their cars, and hammers that transform into screwdrivers that transform into corkscrews.) It was right up his alley, if not particularly Parisian. He was ready for anything.

  We had flown all night, from Oklahoma to Atlanta and on to Orly, where we deplaned into what looked to me more like a dingy warehouse, lit in dirty yellows and fluorescent whites, than any airport I’d ever seen. We dragged our bags out to the wet curb, and he flagged down a cab.

  “The Latin Quarter,” he yelled to the driver over the din of the highway. “The Hôtel des Saints-Pères.” I didn’t know what Latin meant, but I knew it had something to do with E PLURIBUS UNUM, those words printed on dollar bills.

  Our hotel was on a skinny street lined with tall stone buildings that seemed to sit too close to the curb. They reminded me of men in starched suits, puffing out their chests. Our room was a sparse, compact cube crammed between a spiral staircase and a central courtyard. It had the usual amenities, but each looked somehow askew, sort of muddled in the translation. The bedspreads were dusty brown, and I’d never seen a bathroom so small. You couldn’t open the door without scraping the knees of the person sitting on the toilet or smacking the rear end of someone at the sink.